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PyCon 2017 is in full swing. The last four days of the conference will be development sprints. If you've never heard about sprints before, this is the time when developers, maintainers, regular users/contributors, AND complete newcomers get together and develop features or fix bugs in their favorite projects. Many projects will be sprinting throughout various rooms. Last year there were roughly 500 people sprinting on many different projects.

If you ever thought of contributing to Open Source projects, but did not know where to start, PyCon sprints are a great place to learn new skills. Having the maintainers of the projects sit at the same table with new contributors always helps to solve issues fast. I am a complete newcomer, don’t know where to start. Is joining development sprints a good idea for me?

Quick answer: yes, of course. Not only do the experienced mentors help new developers at the sprints, we also have some extra help for beginners:

It has been a trend over the past several years that our top sponsors — the companies who step forward to make the biggest investment in PyCon and its community — tend to be companies that not only use Python for their own development, but who turn around and offer Python as a crucial tool for their own customers. And that is certainly true of PyCon’s biggest sponsor this year.PyCon 2017’s Keystone Sponsor is Intel Corporation!Did you see Intel’s booth in the Expo Hall at PyCon 2016 last year? It was a phenomenon. I remember remarking to a fellow volunteer that Intel was making stunningly good use of their space. Their booth was very nearly a small self-contained conference of its own. It featured a large display and space for a speaker to stand, which Intel used to run a busy schedule of quick presentations and tutorials that focused on both Intel hardware and their support tools for developers. There always seemed to be an attentive crowd gathered whenever I would pass by.Given Inte…

[A guest post by PyCon 2017’s Open Spaces Chair, Anna Ossowski!]Open Spaces are one of the most often overlooked activities at the PyCon conference.PyCon is not merely a 5-track conference — it’s true there are 5 tracks of talks, but there are also 5 tracks of Open Spaces that run alongside the talks.What are Open Spaces?Open Spaces are self-organizing meetup-like events which occur in parallel with main conference talks. There are actually more hours of Open Spaces, in total, than there are of talks! While most of the conference is planned months in advance, Open Spaces are created on-site by PyCon attendees. They offer groups the ability to self-gather, self-define, and self-organize in a way that often doesn’t happen anywhere else at PyCon.Open Spaces are one-hour meetups during the three main conference days, held in meeting rooms within the PyCon convention center. Some people reserve spaces to discuss a favorite technology — like web frameworks, neural nets, or natural language …

(A guest post from Jason D. Rowley, one of 2017’s Startup Row Coordinators!)What could be more exciting than startups who use Python and are poised to change industries and help build the future?We are very pleased to announce the seventh batch of companies that get to present on Startup Row. Come and visit Startup Row in PyCon 2017's Expo Hall to see some of the most interesting and innovative new technologies and business models out there, and to hear the engineers and other founders of these leading early-stage companies pitch their ideas and discuss how and why they use Python.And without further ado, here they are — PyCon 2017’s Startup Row batch:KITT.AI (Seattle, WA) – A chatbot authoring platform offering conversational understanding as a service, focusing on multi-turn dialog.Precognitive Inc (Chicago, IL) – Multidimensional fraud protection using device intelligence and behavioral analytics to detect illicit transactions on-the-fly.Astrohaus (New York, NY) – Maker of the …